Skye messes with Big on the way out. “Hey, Big,” she says.
“Eat your food!” he says.
“I will. It’s just, there’s this nasty searin’ fungus goin’ ’round and I been wonderin’ if you know anythin’ ’bout it.”
What’s she up to?
Big stops sharply. “I’m the one who told ya about it, Woman. When I tossed you in ’ere.”
“Was it you?” Skye says, false question in her voice.
“Yah!”
“Oh, I guess I forgot.” Skye’s voice echoes off the walls.
“What about the fungus?” Big asks, a hint of something that I think is fear in his tone.
“Is that a spot of it on your chest?” Skye says, pointing.
Even under the dim light, I can see Big’s face go white. “Where?” he says, frantically searching with his fingers.
“Above that big ol’ crater you call a bellybutton,” she says.
Big’s fingers find the spot, run across his sweaty skin. “Just a mole,” he says, relief evident in the way he breathes out as he says it.
“Good,” Skye says. “I was worried.”
“Now eat your food!” Big repeats, stomping through the doors.
“What was that all about?” I ask Skye.
“Nothin’,” she says. “Just havin’ a bit of fun. When we were brought in, the big fella was goin’ on and on ’bout this flesh eatin’ fungus that’s been goin’ ’round. Seems the only thing he’s scared of. Just wanted to put that fear to the test.”
~~~
There’s not much else to do other than talking, sometimes as a group, sometimes broken up into separate conversations. A coupla of times I move to the front of my cell, stick my head out the bars, look up and down the row, hoping to get another look at one of the others—okay, okay, Skye mostly—but none of them are ever doing the same. Well, except for Buff, who seems to be doing the same thing, except his eyes are always on the cell I suspect belongs to the song-voiced one they call Wilde.
When I make a rude gesture he slinks back into his cell.
So I just sit there, arms draped over the bars, waiting. For Wes. For anybody.
I picture how it’ll be when we’re reunited with Jolie, how her smile will fill up my heart, how she’ll wrap her arms around me and I’ll swing her in a circle.
There’s movement to my left, from the cell next to mine. The girl sticks her head out. Skye’s sister, Siena. She glances my way, smiles a rather pretty smile, and then leans as far to the edge in the other direction as possible, as if I might have the Cold and share it with her. I frown, perplexed as to her strange anti-me behavior, but then a pair of strong arms reaches out from the cell beyond hers. She’s barely able to reach them, to grasp them, to hold them. There’s something so tender, so longing, so loving in the simple touch I witness, between Siena and Circ, that I feel a yearning in my own heart. Not for anyone in particular, certainly not for any of my exes, not even for Skye—although she has captured my interest—but just for a connection to someone like the one I see between Skye’s sister and the Heater boy.
As they continue to hold hands, they whisper to each other, laugh, whisper some more, laugh some more. Everything seems so easy for them, like one was made for the other. Like they never had a choice. Almost like destiny. As I pull back into my cell, I’m left wondering if it’s always been that way for them.
~~~
“Psst! Skye!” I hiss through the hole in the wall.
Everything’s dark. A few hours back, Big stomped through the dungeon extinguishing all the torches. Everyone’s sleeping. I should be sleeping. But I can’t, not without clearing something up first.
“Psst!” I hiss again.
“Sun goddess sear it, Icy! This’d better be good.” I can sense her face at the hole, her lips turned into a frown that could kill.
I smile in the dark.
“I’ve got something to say,” I whisper.
“Well, out with it, Icy.”
“Dazz,” I say.
“That’s what you wanted to say? To tell me yer name agin?”
“Nay, nay, I’m just saying call me Dazz. In ice country, icy means…”
“Spit it out, Icy. I’m tired.”
“Attractive,” I say.
“And yer not?” she asks. Is she asking me? Is she saying I am…icy? What is she saying? “An icy Icy,” she whispers, floating the words off her tongue. It’s the gentlest I think I’ve ever heard her voice sound.
“Uh,” I say.
“Yer smoky, Dazz,” she says, my name sounding strange coming from her. “But that ain’t nothin’ where I come from. Not that I mind a-lookin’ sometimes.”
I almost choke on the wad of spit that’s congealing in my throat. I’ve never had a woman be so…honest with me. Not that women aren’t honest, a lot of them are, too honest sometimes, but Skye seems to say every last thought that pops into her head. It’s exhilarating in a way, although I couldn’t imagine doing the same. If I said half the things floating around in my brain right now, she’d probably never speak to me again.
“Now, are we done, or are we done?” she says. “This feather-hard floor is callin’ my name.”
“Wait,” I say. “Nay, there was something else.”
“Well then hocker it up like the lump that always seems to be in yer throat.”
Heart of the Mountain, is she reading my thoughts now, too? I gotta get control of things again, if I ever had control of them in the first place. “Look, I just wanted you to know that I’m usually a better fighter. I really was surprised when you turned around and found out you were a—”
“A woman. I know. Full of curves and a mix of hard and soft spots and all the things that guys git all wooloo over. But even if I hadn’ta been a woman, or if you weren’t surprised and all that, I’da still’ve beat you redder’n the fire country sky. You can count on that, Icy.”
My jaw drops and I try to lift it back up but it’s dead weight. I’m thankful it’s dark and she can’t see me. “Now wait just a minute, you’ve never even seen me fight. I’ve been in more scraps in the last week than you’ve probably seen your entire life.”
“I ain’t tryin’ to compete, Dazzy. I’m just sayin’ truths, which can be hard to hear sometimes. Sleep on it and you’ll feel much better in the mornin’.”
Sleep on it? You bet your cute little arse I’ll sleep on it. And I’ll prove to her one way or the other that I can hold my own in a fight. Certainly better than Feve, who’s probably who she’s comparing me to.
“G’night, icy Dazz,” she says, completely disarming me. I lay down with my own shoulder and arms as a pillow, not thinking about proving that I can fight, but about whether she meant icy with a capital or lowercase “i”, smiling like a butcher’s sled dog.
~~~
Boredom sets in pretty hard the next day. People are used to having the right to come and go as they please, so if you take that right away from them, they get bored very quickly. At least I do.
All of us seem energized after sleeping, though, and when morning comes—in the form of a pathway of torches lit by a lumbering Big, still shirtless and so meaty he looks capable of feeding a village of cannibals for a month—everyone’s ready to talk some more. Buff, being Buff, suggests a game of sorts.
“I’ve got some rocks that broke off the floor,” Buff says. “I toss one to whoever I please, and I get to ask them a question.”
“A question ’bout what?” Skye hollers down the row.
“Anything,” Buff says. “Whatever I want. And the person who’s got the rock has to answer, and when they do, they get to throw the rock to someone else and ask their own question.”
“What’re we, a bunch of game-lovin’ Midders tryin’ to figure out which boy thinks they’re smoky?” Skye says.
I laugh, starting to catch onto the fire country lingo.
I make a suggestion. “We’ll play Buff’s little game, but let’s stick to questions about fire or ice country.”
“’Specially blaze about Goff, the Cure, and the Glassies,” Skye suggests.